Solitude Media
The fact is: now we can talk, yapping with our computers until we literally run out of things to say. We can generate media, images, sounds, videos without even connecting to the internet. Literally, without another human/social on the other side.
It’s just you and your machine. Alone. Isn’t that terrifying?
But I think that’s exactly where the beauty of current tech lies.
Imagine this scenario: someone creates a single-player edition of a social-media app, a perfect Twitter clone, 100% identical.
But inside, there are a million NPC accounts. The AI NPCs behave exactly like real humans surpassing uncanny valley and turing test. They generate million posts, covering the full spectrum of human expression, from the cinema beauty to the disgusting slop.
And the only real account… is you: the player, the human.
Isn’t that just like a single-player video game? Your tweets, your posts, your chitchats, your unhinged takes, they wouldn’t impact the “real world” at all. Zero risk.
No specific mission either, like Minecraft Creative Mode.
Would likes/followers all metrics still matter? Would your thoughts, your opinions, still hold meaning?
In The Solitude Media
(Social Media: Single-Player Edition)
How would we humans behave?
How would we cope?
How would we exist?
We’ve been struggling with the problems of social media for over a decade now. The algos and their game make our attention degraded. I think that’s because most humans have untrained minds, afraid of the void, afraid of loneliness, afraid of being unvalidated.
But if all of that turns out to be artificial? I think the artificial world is the antidote to social media.
Having deep conversations with today’s models alone is enough to leave me questioning existence itself.
There’s a famous quote: “Greatness comes from solitude.”
What if someone like Bruce Lee, training alone in a cave, physically and mentally, this time had a powerful computer filled with hundreds of enterprise GPUs, and remember: no internet! Or imagine giving an super multimodal chat app to a Himalayan monk or a Shaolin master. What will the result look like? What will they gain and get?
I’m also curious about the potential current model for solo therapy. Like, are there any methodologies on how we could use to overcome depression, mental illness, or heartbreak?
I choose to be stupidly optimistic about the future because my gut tells me that the current state of tech can bring compounded self-improvement like never before, without any flesh mentors, gurus, or anything like that. You can just practice the things.
What happens when we seek greatness in The Solitude Media? Are we gonna sharpen our intuition and self-control until we no longer skill-issue about it? Or are we gonna go downward spiral in the name of absurd existence?